VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.

Thanks for mentioning qemu that looks interesting.
But really you can't compare VMWARE with Bochs.
Bochs is a full emulator--it's relatively SLOW, vmware is more a virtualizer. It's more akin to qemu's accelator(it appears) or plex86. And Xen is better than VMWare in speed, but requires that your OS be written to run on the XEN Virtual Machine, IIRC.

Xen requires support from the host kernel. So does VMWare. Some of the stuff they do simply can not be done from user-space applications. That's not the reason that Xen can't run on Windows as a host OS.

Xen does require than the GUEST operating system be modified to run under Xen. The technique it uses is called paravirtualization, and allows Xen to run much faster than VMWare (especially in I/O performance). That's why Xen can only run open source OSes at the moment.

When processors with hardware virtualization support become available from AMD and Intel, that restriction will be lifted.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. One could even create a generic machine with an empty HD image using the evaluation version, store that away, and then make copies and install any system from CDs under the free player. Unless the player is crippled so you can't access CDs, that is.

Right, the way I know VMWare you can't change the size of a disk image, but since the image "grows" you can make it as many gigs you like and it still won't be that big until it gets filled with actual data. Because the image represents a disk, I believe you can have partitions on it and change their sizes as you wish, I'm not sure how partitions would affect the growing feature though.

Think this has got anything to do with the Xen team knocking at the back door? I'd say yes...VERY good strategic move by VMware team...downloading the program and browser appliance now, if its lightweight then its gonna be interesting to watch the impact, the ability to run vmachine across the entire office without paying for 200 licenses for vmware itself is a very interesting beast...go go gadget vmachines...kudos for linux and windows player at the same time

You can play with a preinstalled oracle, weblogic + portal and all the gadgets, etc.

Hopefully after this release a lot more folks will get into the act and provide sample images. E.g. it'd be nice to play around with a new rev of OpenBSD without having to go through the whole install.

I'm waiting until I can run something like ReactOS in VMWare, it beats Qemu which doesn't seem to run it very fast. Interestingly enough I can run Windows 98 in Qemu with reasonable speed, but not ReactOS which I expect is lighter.

This should make the testing of new OSes (or OS features) more accessible. Currently Live CDs tend to be full blown as they are competing OS to OS. With a click-to-try approach such as this, a particular featureset can be demonstrated, or a very minimal trial environment. And not only do you not need to burn a CD, you don't even need to reboot, or suffer the sloth of a CD-ROM drive. All in all this should help people try out other OSes and OS features. I like it.

Nothing. I've installed several Linux distro's into the virtual disk images by modifying the .vmx file to specify a .iso and boot from that. I know of others who have installed various versions of Windows under it as well.

The difference is that VMWare is a commercial product. Prior to this, you couldn't use it without either paying for a license or fetching a new trial license each month (and come up with a new working email address each time).

I'm afraid it won't be long until someone releases a separate, free vm creator script/program. It can't be very hard to do. I wonder how VMWare would respond to that. Hopefully not with arbitrary legal restrictions or some ridiculous encryption scheme.

I don't honestly think it would matter. There all always ways around programs, and there are always people who will download the demo and google for a serial code. I have to assume that the player lacks some functionality or advanced features, and even if it doesn't and someone creates a set of scripts, thats probably not vmware's market. After all, if you want to install linux on Windows, you can always use colinux. Not as much polish, but it works and its free.
This would allow for an easy way to let people demo their os(as the teaser says) and I can see this being useful for a group of people who want to test cross-platform apps. That way they need one copy of vmware to create the image, and the developers can use the image to test their app.

The qemu-img tool that comes with QEmu is already capable of reading VMWare format disk image files, or converting between various disk image formats. The virtual machine configuration file is just a plain text file, and even though there are a lot of options, it would not be at all difficult to write a simple program to create them. The player seems to regenerate missing data (like incorrect UUIDs, or missing NVRAM files) automatically, just like VMWare Workstation does, so that's not a problem either.

They may have put some preventative measures in place, but they know that they'll be ineffective. If someone wants to use VMWare Player inappropriately, they're going to do it regardless. So their strategy is obviously more complicated than that.

Hmm... I must try this thing out with a Linux LiveCD. Assuming they haven't crippled it to prevent booting from a CD (I certainly would have), it could prove quite useful.

Does VMWare player still allow boot from a user-selectable .iso? If so, somebody could create a series of "Blank Hard Drive" virtual machines (which would only be a few kb downloads, due to compression) and then we could install anything we wanted on them.

They are basing their Webbrowser on Ubuntu - but doesn't provide a deb for Ubuntu!
What a shame. The vmware player tar.gz tries to install all sorts of hibbujavvi startupscripts and kernel modules - not something I am going to do. The rpm cannot be converted to deb either.

- Solidifying their stance as a company commited to the usefulness of virtualization. Why not?! You may find it slow but with all of the mom and pops running around with 3.2 GHz beasts of machine, maybe they can put their machine to good use and learn about alternative tech.

- Gifting something that has been lacking with the industry. Qemu can be a pain to setup quickly, and their image support is a little lame.

Now maybe if they open-sourced some of their codebase... hmm... (riiight)

Well I reconfigured the boot sequence to boot from my Suse 10 ISO and surprise surprise the installation started just fine. It looks like the drive is writable between reboots. So really you should be able to install just about any OS on it...

The player is great stuff. Also if you are looking to demo ESX capabilities and and advanced features like Vmotion or play around with either FC or Ethernet based iSCSI SANs, you can get demo software that works well with the VMware offerings at: http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelody_govirtual.asp